INFRASTRUCTURE as a Service

The Challenge

Businesses need a forward-thinking plan to support continued expansion and to enable them to efficiently manage new, bandwidth-hungry technology as well as significant demands on power, cooling and connectivity. With increasingly sophisticated CGI, rendering and other computing requirements, it is vital for companies to find faster and more efficient ways to ramp up for major projects.

These demands can lead to a need to rapidly increase hardware and software systems to meet project demands or result in too much being deployed and then it being underutilised whilst capital is tied up in depreciating assets.

The Solution

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can confer multiple benefits, saving on power consumption and space — both at a premium in many companies — while providing almost instant scalability and the ability to utilise additional services on demand.

IaaS can provide infrastructure – storage, compute, archive, networking, workstations or other dedicated hardware – either in a secure datacentre or hosted on your site without the upfront capital investment of purchasing dedicated hardware. Autonomy is unaffected as you – the customer – still retain all the access required to manage and support everyday operations and can continue to hold responsibility for all day-to-day applications and user configurations. ERA have over 18 years of experience working in this space and are able to offer customers a full end-to-end IaaS solution tailored to your needs now and for the future.

The Benefits

Financially, savings can be made on the cost of power and cooling, as well as office space, IT support and system management. Furthermore, all hardware and software purchased can be classed as a service, not a capital asset, moving spending from Capex to Opex and allowing those funds to be used elsewhere.

For an off-site solution ERA assume responsibility for secure and reliable connectivity and performance, providing remote access to hardware via direct dark fibre connection – all supported by a full 24/7 Service Level Agreement (SLA). A key gain is the scalability and flexibility it offers to your business. With ERA’s support, access can be immediate with unlimited capacity available to ramp up for large projects, to cope with spikes in say render/workstation usage or storage processing for short periods or several months. As an example virtual servers within the infrastructure could easily be accessed on a monthly basis within ERA’s virtual environment.

Moving to an outsourced model can enable companies to better respond to their clients’ needs, manage their internal resource more efficiently and expand their core business. Traditionally, a company’s IT team spends valuable time on hardware support, upgrades and managing connectivity issues. Now their skills can be focused back on the business, developing creative solutions for the company and their clients. Furthermore, as real estate prices continue to spiral, precious square-footage that has previously been used for equipment storage can be repurposed into revenue-generating spaces.

Outsourcing your production IT infrastructure with IaaS to ERA could allow your business to be scalable on a new level and with the new efficiencies this model delivers enable you to work smarter and faster on every new project.

where media and IT converge

Talk to ERA today and see what we can do together to benefit your business.